During interviews earlier this month with the House select subcommittee on the pandemic, Dr. Deborah Birx conceded that the Trump administration was “distracted” from its work on COVID-19 because of the election, and that the administration’s early failures likely led to as many as 130,000 unnecessary deaths.
While Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator under Trump, appears to have shaded the truth at times last year, she’s now free to speak her mind.
Birx, detailed advice that she said the White House ignored late last year, including more aggressively testing younger Americans, expanding access to virus treatments and better distributing vaccines in long-term care facilities. More than 130,000 American lives could have been saved with swifter action and better coordinated public health messages after the virus’ first wave, Birx told lawmakers. “I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30-percent less, to 40-percent less range,” Birx said.
It's good to finally hear these words from Birx, even though she was almost certainly lying last March when she said this of Trump: “He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data. I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”
While Birx’s transparent “Trump-loves-the-details” bullshit undermined her credibility, at least she’s fessing up now that she's no longer under the thumbs of the Trump administration. Birx also noted that Trump’s election-season push to pretend that he’d done a great job on the pandemic distracted him and his administration from actually addressing the crisis. “I felt like the White House had gotten somewhat complacent through the campaign season,” she told the subcommittee. She also stated that the election “just took people’s time away from and distracted them away from the pandemic, in my personal opinion.”
Birx was also asked directly if Trump “did everything he could to try to mitigate the spread of the virus and save lives during the pandemic.” Her answer? A blunt, “No.” Of course, once again, a Democrat was tasked with stating the obvious. “The Trump White House’s prioritization of election year politics over the pandemic response—even as cases surged last fall—is among the worst failures of leadership in American history,” said South Carolina Rep. James E. Clyburn, chair of the subcommittee.
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